What are Sky Sports playing at?

[forestfan]

Sky sports at this moment

407 American football ( who gives a eff this is the UK)

Quite a lot of people, these days. They sell out several Wembley matches every year despite the high ticket prices.

Not sure what they were showing yesterday though, as the season is over...

[murf]

Sky sports at this moment

407 American football ( who gives a eff this is the UK)

Quite a lot of people, these days. They sell out several Wembley matches every year despite the high ticket prices.

Not sure what they were showing yesterday though, as the season is over...

Occasional 'one off' games attract attention but it routine matches are a bit 'niche', like women's sport and golf/tennis etc - loads will watch the Ryder Cup/Wimbledon and a bit less the other majors. Anything else? Very few....

One issue is the sheer number of channels/services so it is all spread a bit thin. Sky are still showing as much footie and F1 etc but they are filling gaps with less popular niche sports and more footie is being sold to other providers (BT and now Amazon etc). Sky starting to feel like the BBC did 10 (20?) years ago....

[forestfan]

NFL has a very committed niche following, I know there’s a lot of once a year Super Bowl viewers but those who are genuinely interested tend to tune in most weeks (there’s bigger all else to do on Sunday evenings which helps!) I expect weekly viewing figures outweigh non-major golf and tennis etc. though could be wrong. NFL has been an established sport on Sky for a couple of decades, so don’t think it’s something that is representative of the service’s decline.

Anyway, thought Dot would like NFL - it’s brutal, has some politically incorrect team names, and not a woman in sight apart from cheerleaders

[forestfan]

A quick flick through the BARB ratings for Sky Sports, excluding football, suggests the next most popular sports are (roughly in order) F1, darts, cricket, WWE, boxing, NFL and golf, though obviously varying by nature of event.

[Dot]

Names to faces...

Bottom left, hair looks a bit STRINGY.. is that you Maldini?

Good to see you take up one of your old Aliases after your ban , must be 6 years since you used " Tim Bisley " Paul.

[forestfan]

Going back to Sky losing European football, as I expected, it’s proved bad for the viewer, as we just have to pay two subscriptions and Sky don’t drop their rates when they lose things.

Every chance it will fragment even more, with Amazon already in the sports market and you have to expect the likes of Apple and Netflix will at least dip their toe in the water, leading to more expensive subscriptions all round. And how long before they PPV the biggest games as per big boxing fights?

[Magic]

Names to faces...

Dot top left.

Nah, this guy is more Dot:

[admin]

Who gives a eff about women's sports I certainly dont

How very sexist, Dot. Shame on you.

P.S. Can anyone tell me how to remove Women Team Sports (Cricket, Rugby, Football etc) from my BBC News App so I just see Mens team sports news?

[Dot]

Who gives a eff about women's sports I certainly dont

How very sexist, Dot. Shame on you.

P.S. Can anyone tell me how to remove Women Team Sports (Cricket, Rugby, Football etc) from my BBC News App so I just see Mens team sports news?

And me

[plevna1963]

Names to faces...

Dot top left.

Nah, this guy is more Dot:

Looks like a combo of the (late) Clive James & Chubby Brown.

[wolviebob]

Nothing dull about ladies golf...

[blahblah]

That's rude

[Yarmolarmolenko]

Sky have lost Champions League football, a lot of Premier League games to BT over the years, and ATP Tennis, given the increased competition from Amazon and the like, they could lose PL football altogether, if that happens they really are finished, that's the main reason why people subscribe in the first place, they can cope without the tennis and Europe, but not the PL, that's their bread and butter, I don't think Sky are going all PC at all, I think they are panicking and trying to use women's sports as an insurance policy, men will cancel straight away the day PL football is a gonner, get people, mostly women, interested in women's sports now, grow the product and the women will put a stop to the man cancelling. But it wont work because even women prefer men's football, the average attendance for Women's Super League is 3,400.

It's not bigotry or misogynistic to not like Women's football, it's common sense that when you have been watching men's Football for years, then suddenly watch women's football, it's not the same, the drop in intensity, power and skill level is too much, it's the same with Cricket, they can barely hit 4's let alone 6's. Only women's sport I do like is WTA tennis, because it's played in a much shorter space rather than a big wide open pitch, the differences in power is a lot less noticeable to the naked eye, you can't tell the difference much between a ball being hit at 130mph and 110mph, you just know it's fast.

BBC have gone down the women's sport market at well for more or less the same reasons, they've lost a lot of sport over the years to subscription based channels and constantly need something else, anything else to justify the license which isn't justifiable as their viewership has crashed massively over the years, their top programme for years was Eastenders that regularly had 15 million + viewers every episode (far more popular than any one football game in England) now it averages around 4 million and will eventually have less than 1 million in part thanks to the rise of netflix etc, they promote the magic of the FA Cup but would rather show a PL clash in it such as Chelsea v Liverpool tonight, they need to chase viewers.

In a nutshell Sky's attempt to fatten out their sports offerings with women's sports, niche sports and novelty events like one of NFL games at Wembley, are futile, it's all about Premier League

[murf]

Sky haven't lost a lot of PL games.

They are still showing pretty much the same as ever, if not more (think it went up 2 games last time) - there are just more games on offer now and BT have taken up the extras.

Agree with pretty much everything else you said. I guess it is what we are used to. I also like women's athletics which, like tennis, has been in the forefront all my life. I'll occasionally watch women's cycling which, to the naked eye, seems as good as men's in terms of skill level.
Women's tennis has developed different tactics as it isn't all power based so you can enjoy it on it's own merits. Women's football is (to me) just a much poorer version of the men's game so there is zero appeal.
The decrease in level is partly due to natural aptitude but also because us blokes are brought up kicking balls around so the good ones come through. How many potentially good female players in their 20s and 30s have never kicked a ball??? Many of the top/mid line women pros (and semi pros) probably would be playing sunday league (or resorting to typing about it on FISO) if there were equal numbers of women playing because the good ones would be there ahead of them. Maybe this will change in the future as young girls get more into it and the infrastructure improves - but that wasn't how it was when today's 20-30 year olds were kids.

[forestfan]

Well, it’s future generations who the women’s football is aimed at. We (40+ males) aren’t really the target market. I just don’t have room in my life for any more football competitions to follow, for a start... whereas generating interest among the youngsters will result in standards rising and crowds increasing in future. I won’t begrudge that for the sake of a bit of over-promotion of it at this point in time.

In response to the post before, though, to repeat myself... NFL isn’t a “novelty” sport even in this country, it’s had a cult following here since the 80s and regular Wembley games since the 00s. And Sky themselves have been showing it for decades.

[Yarmolarmolenko]

NFL is a novelty to the masses, but yeah it has had small cult following in the UK for a very long time, but the UK has a substantial American population which helps and why games are held in London where most of them are, I would hazard a guess if Tom Brady walked down any high street in a typical English town 99.9% of people would not recognise him including myself, I just know the name. It's a bit like football, or soccer, to the average American over there, unlike most countries where it's the number 1 or 2 sport, over there it's ranked 5th and many are unfamiliar with your Neymar's, Aguero's and Lewandoski's. Basketball in the UK is very similar, most people I knew had never heard of Kobe Bryant when news broke that he died, think Sky show it but in the dead of the night because of the time difference. Sachin Tendulkar one of the greatest if not greatest Cricketer of all time...the president of the United States had clearly never heard of him based on his attempt to pronounce his name on a recent trip to India, and he had time to practice lol.

Point being is certain countries like certain sports because of the the culture of their own country, what they've grown up with, unfortunately as popular as football is and what the national sports are, women's football is basically a different sport and is so far behind the curve in a completely saturated market it will also only ever be niche in the UK as well. Same as women's boxing.

I see no reason why women however cannot compete WITH men in sports such as Formula 1, Darts, Snooker.

[forestfan]

Anyway, Sky have nine sports channels, and in a way, just about anything other than PL/CL football could be called a “niche” sport, so they will always show plenty of those! I don’t think it’s the reason why they’ve lost European football etc.

[blahblah]

Whoever she is on BBC Sport tonight is better than Rio and Lily, imho

[Dot]

I see no reason why women however cannot compete WITH men in sports such as Formula 1, Darts, Snooker.

Reanne Evans is the current female World Snooker champion and has won the title a record 12 times

Alison Fisher won several world championchips mainly back in the 90's


Reanne has made a century break on 2 (yes 2) occasions in her career. Alison made 11 back in the day.

Ronnie O Sullivan passed a 1000 century breaks last year.

Yeah the women can compete

[Yarmolarmolenko]

Obviously that's because the ratio of male to female players both at professional and amateur levels is obviously gigantic, when you have such a small sample size of female players you can't make a fair comparison, same with Darts, vast majority of players are male, In theory there's no reason why they can't compete with men but the numbers are not there.